"Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy– it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom, and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it."
Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light

blast from the (near-recent) past

So, after I turned in my Phonology final today, I headed to the Stevenson coffee shop to take a nap, as is my wont.

I dozed off for about fifteen minutes. When I woke up, the coffee shop was playing a Pandora station that was basically a Top 40 station– if the year were 1998. They had it all– Destiny’s Child, Chumbawumba, Britney Spears, and other spectacular examples of late-nineties badness.

For a moment, I panicked. My mind was not making of the thinkings particularly well (I repeat: I’d just woken up), and because of that, I thought that I had spontaneously traveled through time fifteen years into the past.

I turned to a nearby citizen, and trying not to sound too crazy, I cried, “wHAt yEar iS It?????” So, I pretty much failed spectacularly.

She gave me a puzzled look. “2013,” she said.

“Oh,” I replied. “Good.”

Satisfied that I had not gone all Billy Pilgrim, I went back to sleep, where I had a dream in which the full lineups of N*Sync, the Backstreet Boys, and One Direction did the Gangnam Style dance to Eiffel 65’s “Blue (Da Ba Dee)”.

Pity me, netizens, for I have seen the true face of horror.

I’ma go soak my brain in shoegazer and alt metal to get the stains out.